A math professor mentioned that the final segment of Fermat's name would probably have been pronounced [t] because of "where he was from." She didn't clarify further but I looked up where he's from and he was Gascon and a speaker of that language (sometimes considered a dialect of Occitan). Could someone confirm that this would have been the case in the Occitan of his day? I searched around and couldn't find anything attesting to this.
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3It looks like your professor is correct. Wiki mentions petit/pichòt [peˈtit]/[piˈtʃɔt] en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gascon_language – Alex B. Oct 9 '18 at 19:46
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1It is hard to answer to this question because it is a proper name. As for the pronunciation of 't', in a general way, it does not seem that the Gascon pronounces systematically this sound at the end of words. There is also a lot of variation inside of Gascon. Look at this website, there are some spoken corpora on the Romance varieties of France: atlas.limsi.fr/index-en.html – amegnunsen Oct 9 '18 at 21:17
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Do you mean "how might he have pronounced it if he spoke the local dialect?", or "how did he himself actually pronounce it?". Recall that he was rather upper class. – user6726 Oct 9 '18 at 21:18
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3@user6726 either question. Was the pronunciation of the final /t/ stigmatized in his day? – ubadub Oct 9 '18 at 21:20
Fermat was fluent in multiple languages, including French and Occitan. Though he was born and raised in Beaumont-de-Lomagne (Occitania), his paternal family was originally from Catalonia:
In the second half of the fifteenth century, the Fermat family apparently emigrated from Catalonia to Beaumont-de-Lomagne...
- Pierre de Fermat (1601?-1665): His life besides mathematics, European Mathematical Society Newsletter (No.42)
As such his name's authentic pronunciation was likely /ferˈmat/.
A contemporary prestige dialect French pronunciation would likely have been /fer'ma(t)/, since texts from the late 17th century imply that word terminal -t should only regularly be pronounced when occurring before a vowel.1
1. L'art de prononcer parfaitement la langue françoise, 1689 (p.349)
